Israeli elections: The New Yorker's David Remnick responds to Walter Russell Mead

1/24/13 12:08 PM EST

New Yorker editor David Remnick sends POLITICO his response to Walter Russell Mead, who yesterday accused the U.S. media, and Remnick in particular, of missing the mark ahead of yesterday's elections in Israel.

"If you’ve read anything about Israeli politics in the past couple weeks, you probably came away expecting a major shift to the right—the far right," Mead, an editor-at-large at The American Interest, argued. "That was the judgment of journalists at the NYT, WSJ, BBC, NBC, Time, Reuters, Guardian, HuffPo,Slate, Salon, Al Jazeera, and countless others. The most shameful piece of journalism was David Remnick’s 9,000-word feature in last week’s New Yorker, detailing the irrevocable popular rise of Israel’s radical right."

"That didn’t happen," Mead writes. "The ultra-right lost big time, while the centrists gained significant ground—so much so that Bibi now has the option of forming a coalition government without the ultra-Orthodox Haredim."

Walter Russell Mead seems very exercised, as if I had wanted the hard-liners I was writing about to win. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are also facts. I never said, as Mead does, that Naftali Bennett would "take over" Israeli politics; what I was portraying was a current that was new, growing and intent on pushing a new Netanyahu government further to the right. "A third hand on the wheel," as Bennett put it to me. When I reported, wrote, and published my piece, Bennett was polling at around fifteen seats and the Israeli press---on all sides---reflected this phenomenon of increasingly confident religious nationalism and a Likud Party that had jettisoned relative moderates like Dan Meridor and taken in hard-core annexationists, like Moshe Feiglin. Clearly, unseen by the polls, things changed in the last few days before the election, and it seems that many middle-class voters, who were anxious about various social and economic issues and who were made uneasy by the prospect of an even more right-wing government, came out, in far bigger numbers than anyone had predicted for Yair Lapid. They knew him from television and he represented a fresh, centrist alternative to the old parties, scary reactionaries, and over-familiar faces. And so Lapid shocked everyone––including himself. And so every journalist and pollster had to admit that he had not anticipated this. I certainly did in my post called "Bibi's Blues." But it should also be said that Bennett did win twelve seats, that the Likud is more conservative than it was, that the right, overall, is more hardline in many ways. What's more, Yair Lapid does not lean left, especially on the Palestinian issue. His views on that are not far at all from Netanyahu's. Nothing would please me more than to see the "Nixon goes to China" scenario––meaning that Netanyahu finds a way to engage with the Palestinian leadership (as fractured as it is) and come to an agreement. The occupation is ruinous for all and in so many ways and, while it is undoubtedly beyond complicated to achieve a secure and lasting peace, the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Whether this election will cause that to happen––well, perhaps this is not the moment for hasty predictions. Let it be so.